Is Virtualization all about the OS?

Interesting how much of the fighting talk around virtualization vendors seems to be happening in the Australian media these days. After an interview with an Australian VMware exec in which he says that Windows will be dead in about 5 to 10 years (read here).
The rebuttal now comes from one of Microsoft's new buddies Red Hat. Who would've thought that about a year ago eh? The most unlikely alliances seem to be formed, in an effort to try and reverse the seemingly unstoppable march of VMware in the enterprise.
Its a natural reaction perhaps that the OS vendors 'attack' from their 'comfort zone', that what they know best (the OS). Actually, its interesting that Microsoft lets others make the more outrages claims, such as:

"Virtualisation is all about how applications interface with the operating system. This is one thing that Microsoft agrees 100 per cent with us on."

Silly me, now why did I think it was all about uncoupling the applications from the underlying hardware and making them portable? Hmmm crazy idea...

"We are in a unique position because we are strong in virtualisation and we are strong in the operating system area with Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

No doubt that Red Hat has some server market share and that they have been successful in cobbling together a few pieces of Open Source software. Ironic perhaps to think that one of the reasons of their success is that people might have seen them as their savior from Microsoft.

"We and Microsoft we are the only two vendors with all the pieces together for a full virtualisation system."

I guess he's conveniently forgetting Microsoft's other buddy here (Novell/Suse), not to mention many others (Sun, etc...)

"Many other vendors are putting hypervisors in the market by themselves without the operating system. That's like having just a mousepad and no mouse - there's not much you can do with it," Cormier says. "To some extent that's what VMware is.

What else can you say about such a laughable statement...

Whether or not a company survives and thrives in the future, is a subtle combination of a number of factors. They definitely need to either have vision ('out of the box' thinking kind of new ideas) and the ability to execute on their vision or be very fast followers to be successful.
There will always be some that try it with what I can negativists strategies, where they attempt to paint themselves as the winners, based on more quantitive than qualitative measures and without adding any new content to the larger industry discussion.